Are New Yorkers smarter than the rest of us?
My mother was the poster child for "New Yorkers are smarter than everyone else." We once were on a train that was being stopped for a quite reasonable safety issue. A woman, with a heavy New York accent complained... loudly. My mother said a tone of utter disbelief "can you believe how stupid she is. And she's a New Yorker!"
http://www.magazine.org/Editorial/40-40-covers/4.jpg
grew up in New York City. Not near New York City, but in NYC. Right in Manhattan, which is what most people mean when they say New York City.
My mother was the poster child for "New Yorkers are smarter than everyone else." We once were on a train that was being stopped for a quite reasonable safety issue. A woman, with a heavy New York accent complained... loudly. My mother said a tone of utter disbelief "can you believe how stupid she is. And she's a New Yorker!"
So this article in which the Smithsonian speaks in my mother's voice from the grave did not surprise me at all.
Having lived in NYC as an adult (I didn't escape until I was 28) and in California for the rest of my life, I can say that in my experience New Yorkers are neither smarter, nor less smart than any other group. But they have a huge blind spot.
New Yorkers think that because they see people from different countries every day; and because there are restaurants from every country in the world in Manhattan, that they are worldly. And I'll grant that the average New Yorker may know more about "foods of the world" than the average resident of Missouri. But the average New Yorker knows little about the people of Missouri, or Kansas, or Idaho, or Texas.
There's a famous New Yorker magazine cover showing the "View from 9th Avenue" showing the entire US as being one small back yard on the way to the Pacific ocean. And that is, in my experience, the New York blindspot.
